There's an archive that has most if not all the songs uploaded to mp3.com between 2000 and 2003 before the site was shut down. It is divided in two parts and it's over a terabyte in size. It can be downloaded
here. While downloading the whole thing is necessary to listen to the tracks, anyone with a big HDD and good internet connection can possibly do this. Maybe we can find a way to host all these tracks online, somewhere, but we'll see that later.
Currently, I have access to (most) of the archive, over 200k files. While most of the music is not metal, I've found dozens of metal tracks while searching randomly, and there might be tens of thousands, many by bands that are not here on the site. Given the sheer amount of files and the whole potential of this archive, I think that we could do a community effort to try and get through it to try and find all the bands not present on the site, and try to do the proper research in order to submit them.
The list of files can't be seen unless you download the entire thing, however, I made a Python script to parse all these files into a .xlsx file with their metadata, and you can find it here:
.xlsx file with over 200k filesI don't think that's the whole archive because when the person that has it decompressed it, some files seemed to be corrupt, but that should be most of it. I have access to it through Filezilla so I can download all the files in that list. If anyone needs any file for your own research, send me a private message here (or on Discord, you'll find me in the site's server) and I'll try to get it for you.
If anyone downloads the whole thing and wants to create a list of all the files just like the one here, you can use
this Python script I made that I mentioned earlier.
Feel free to mention any interesting findings in the list.